World War 1 and the Europe we left behind

With Europe torn by nationalism and class struggles, was it really the end of
a "Golden Age"? In the first of a compelling 12-part series about
the First World War, Patrick Bishop questions our rose-tinted hindsight

The First World War was a great catastrophe that begat greater and worse catastrophes. The ruin to come was famously glimpsed by the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey as he stood at the window of his office on the eve of Britain’s declaration of war.

He looked out at the sun setting over St James’s Park and the lights coming on in The Mall and remarked to a friend: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” It was a rare flash of eloquence from a man not noted for his clarity of speech.

The metaphor was chillingly precise — the world was indeed moving from light to darkness — and the prophecy remarkably accurate. Grey died in 1933, seven months after Hitler came to power and ensured that the First and Second World Wars became a more or less continuous event.

There were others across Europe who sensed the immensity of the storm that was breaking and understood somehow that a long and largely progressive era of the continent’s history was at an end. “The curses of the nations will be upon you!”proclaimed Sergei Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, when the German Ambassador presented Germany’s declaration of war.

For many, though, the war did not feel like a disaster. Rupert Brooke’s famous poem thanking God who had “matched us with His hour” may have been a piece of post-adolescent posturing inspired by a bust-up with his girlfriend rather than a burning desire to get to grips with the Hun, but it struck a chord in Britain.

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In Germany, France and Austria-Hungary, mobilisation produced mass outbursts of patriotic hysteria and rejoicing. For the French, it was an opportunity to wipe out the shame of their defeat by the Prussians 43 years before and to restore Alsace and Lorraine to their rightful owners.

For the Germans, it was the chance to fulfil the destiny that had been denied them by their spiteful, greedy neighbours. For the Austro-Hungarians, it was a pretext to slap down the Serbs once and for all.

The spring in the step of the soldiers marching away and the ecstatic cheers of the crowds were a reflection of the widespread belief that the conflict would be short and sharp. “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees,” the Kaiser told departing troops in the first week of August. An officer of the Russian Imperial Guard fretted over whether he should pack his full dress uniform to wear for the triumphant entry into Berlin, or leave it to be delivered by the next courier. There were only a few — Britain’s war minister Lord Kitchener was one of them — who foresaw the terrible slog ahead.

It is Grey’s pessimism rather than the crowds’optimism that has stuck. We tend to view 1914 as a hinge in a doorway leading from a benign, sunlit past to a cold, dark future. It seems to mark the end of a long sequence of progress and prosperity and the beginning of a new Dark Age.

How real, though, was the “Golden Age” that the conflict apparently brought to an end? The great American historian Barbara Tuchman once offered a rule that “all statements of how lovely it was in that era made by persons contemporary with it will have been found to have been made after 1914”.

Before the Great War, all the belligerents had their share of social and political problems. Worst of all was Russia, seething with chronic discontent and presided over by an apathetic and fatalistic Tsar. The Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary was coming apart, its patchwork of ethnicities and languages torn by nationalist passions. Germany, for all its economic vigour and sense of purpose, was taut with social and cultural tensions as was its arch enemy France.

In Britain, the strongly-demarcated layers of society sat uneasily one on top of the other. Four-fifths of the population occupied the bottom stratum supplying the two million domestic servants who ministered to the needs of those at the top.

In Wales, miners were paid less than half a crown a ton to hew the coal that kept Britain’s industries turning. When they rioted in Tonypandy in 1910, troops were sent in. At the outbreak of war, no woman had the vote. As property qualifications were still in force, nor did many of the departing soldiers.

Ireland, “John Bull’s Other Island”, was riven by the Home Rule Question. The prospect that the army might be used against the Protestants of Ulster who were violently opposed to the idea of being ruled by an autonomous Dublin parliament, caused an extraordinary outbreak of defiance by officers. In March 1914, at the Curragh camp, the army’s main base in Ireland, all but a handful said they would resign their commissions rather than fight the Ulster Volunteer paramilitaries.

But for all the inequalities and latent strife, British working-class men marched off to fight for their country with much the same enthusiasm as their French and German counterparts, cheered on by the same loyal women. The prevailing mood of Europe was nationalistic.

Nationalism was a reflection of patriotism and in 1914 patriotism could not be easily imposed or faked. Burgeoning communications, educational advances and the march of democracy meant that the nation had a better idea of what they were fighting to protect than preceding generations.

The mass of Britons were proud of who they were and their dominant place in the world. As Professor Sir Michael Howard pointed out: “It was assumed by all save a small dissident minority that the British Empire was the greatest force for good… ever seen since the disintegration of the Roman Empire.”

They were taking up arms to preserve a system that, for all its shortcomings, was broadly felt to be travelling in the right direction. In 1934 (thus conforming with Tuchman’s rule), when half of Europe was ruled by dictators, the British journalist and historian GP Gooch lamented the passing of the spirit of the time.

“I grew to manhood in an age of sensational progress and limitless self confidence,” he wrote. “Civilisation was spreading across the world with great strides; science was tossing us miracle after miracle; wealth was accumulating at a pace undreamt of in earlier generations; the amenities of life were being brought within the range of an ever-greater number of our fellow creatures.”

Above all there was optimism, “a robust conviction that we were on the right track; that man was a teachable animal who would work out his salvation if given his chance”.

In this atmosphere of prosperity, stability and optimism, the arts flourished. In France and Belgium, this was the belle époque encompassing the sensuous forms of art nouveau and the hard edges of cubism. In Germany, Richard Strauss led the world in musical innovation. Britain had a new crop of literary talent in Conrad, Wells and Kipling. In Vienna there seemed to be a genius in every kaffeehaus. From decrepit, reactionary Russia had emerged the gorgeous talents of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Yes, great power rivalries created crises in contested colonies such as the 1911 Agadir incident between France and Germany, hinting at trouble to come. But the process of globalisation created commercial interdependencies that seemed to make the idea of a large-scale war impossible.

A big best-seller of 1910 was The Great Illusion. Its author Norman Angell argued that the disruption of international credit which would inevitably come with war would either prevent it from breaking out or, if it did, bring it to a speedy end. This view was widely accepted as nothing more than the truth.

Co-operation rather than confrontation seemed to be the way forward. International agreements covering telegraphs, railways, meteorological data, maritime arrangements, the spread of disease and a host of other areas of mutual interest and benefit had been in place for decades.

There had even been an attempt to regulate war itself. In 1898, Tsar Nicolas II, of all people, called for an international conference which convened at The Hague to discuss not only arms limitation but the establishment of an international court to settle disputes between nations by arbitration.

At the opening session, the Tsar warned that the arms race being run by all the major powers to produce larger armies, heavier guns and bigger warships was “transforming the armed peace into a crushing burden that weighs on all nations and, if prolonged, will lead to the very cataclysm that it seeks to avert”.

Fear of war, though, was outweighed by fear of unpreparedness if war broke out, and the race went heedlessly on. The Europe of 1914 swirled with threat and promise. Increased prosperity and a growing mass consciousness, brought about by the spread of literacy and the advent of mass media, increased the danger of class strife – maybe class warfare. Yet the mechanisms of democracy and what John Keegan called “the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent” offered the strong hope that harmony would prevail.

These elements of promise and threat were encapsulated in a single, wonderful invention — the aeroplane. Before the war, all over the continent the public flocked to air shows to marvel at the new flying machines and the daredevils piloting them. Inherent in the spectacle was the sense of possibility, that the frontiers of existence were joyfully expanding. Yet almost immediately, these blissful creations were being fitted with weaponry. Before long, the bomber would come to symbolise the horrors of a new form of warfare that spared no one.

The war, it was often said, came out of a “cloudless sky”. No one, not even the Germans, wanted one. The sequence of events that produced it could have been broken at any time during the five weeks of diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak. When it started, each belligerent hoped that it would be brief and conclusive, redrawing boundaries and readjusting the scales of power — in its own favour, of course — and Europe could pick up where it left off.

Later, when it became clear this would not happen, Allied soldiers would be asked to believe they were fighting the “war to end all wars”. This was the real “great illusion”. The recognition of its hollowness would inform both post-war nihilism and a nostalgia for the world that the catastrophe had shattered.

That world may not have been as marvellous as memory painted it. As Barbara Tuchman observed, “a phenomenon of such extended malignance as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age”.

It is not hard, though, to see why hindsight should have bathed it in such a rosy light. The First World War marked one of the great wrong turnings of history. Had kings and statesmen, generals and diplomats taken a different path, not only would 10 million lives have been saved; in all likelihood, there would have been no Hitler, no Stalin, no Holocaust.